Celebrated today as the father of modern emotional music and the pioneer of opera, Claudio Monteverdi was attacked in his own time for destroying the sacred rules of art, mistreated and fired by his ducal employer, robbed by highwaymen, and driven to alchemy and the priesthood before writing commercial hits in his seventies. This episode begins in Cremona in 1567, where an apothecary's son published sacred music at fifteen and mastered Renaissance polyphony, a system treated as applied mathematics reflecting the divine ratios of the music of the spheres, in which dissonance was not a creative choice but a moral failing.

The conversation follows his hiring at the Gonzaga court in Mantua as a mere string player, the public attack by theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi on music that had not even been published, and Monteverdi's defense of a seconda ...